Fortnight of Fear (2 page)

Kevin sat at the kitchen table. He felt very cold, very
compressed
, as if the shock of seeing the dying man had somehow made him smaller than he already was.

Why had the man smiled at him? What can a drowning man with his stomach all ripped out – what can he possibly find to smile about?

He went into the sweetie-shop for twenty Rothman's and he was pleasantly surprised how little it had changed. The glass-fronted counter with the flying saucers and the aniseed-balls and the licorice-whips was still there; much lower down and much tinier than he remembered; but still the same.

There was a different woman behind the counter – red-haired, this one, with freckles all over her arms; and there was a television on the back shelf, switched to racing from Redcar. But the
smell
was the same; and even though the main road was ten times busier, they hadn't widened it; and the river still ran as dark and reflective as it always had when he was a boy.

“I used to live here, years ago,” he told the red-haired woman. “Just across the river, Number Three Brownlow Lane.”

The red-haired woman smiled. “I'm from Barnsley, myself.”

He left the sweetie-shop and the doorbell jangled behind him. Outside he smelled rain in the air. He crossed the road and stood beside the river, and lit a cigarette. He wondered if those peculiar fish that looked as if they had arms and legs still bred beneath the weir.

Thirty years, first time back to Great Ayton in thirty years. His mother had met the captain of a merchant-ship soon after he had left home, and she had died in Hull of all places. He had stood beside the captain while his
mother had disappeared into the crematorium furnace to the strains of
The Old Rugged Cross
. The captain had smelled strongly of Vick chest-rub. They had shaken hands, and then Kevin had taken the first train back to London, and his job at Pearl Assurance, and his single flat in Islington, just round the corner from the Angel.

This week, he had been taking care of an insurance claim in Middlesborough. He hated Middlesborough, a gray dreary industrial wasteland, butcher's shops with nothing but belly-pork and working-men's clubs with off-key rock'n'roll groups and pints of bitter in straight-sided glasses. He had driven out to Great Ayton for the afternoon just to smell the moors and feel the creamy warmness of the Yorkshire village stone.

He finished his cigarette and flicked it into the river. He looked at his watch. He had a final meeting with the assessors at five, he'd better be getting back. Besides, it was beginning to rain quite hard now, whispering in the grass, drawing compass-circles on the surface of the river.

He was about to cross the road when he saw a small boy running along the pavement, really running. The boy was wearing a school cap and flannel shorts, and a school satchel joggled up and down on his back.
Look at that poor little chap
, he thought to himself.
Running home at full steam just like I used to
.

The boy passed the sweetie-shop, hesitated for a second, then darted across the main road. A coal-lorry blew its horn at him, and the driver shouted out of the window, “Silly young bugger! You could have been killed!”

It was then – to Kevin's horror – that he saw the reason why the boy was running so fast. Out of a shadowy alleyway not far behind him rushed a huge dark creature that billowed like a conjuror's cape. It flew along the pavement with a soft clashing noise, crossed the road, and began to pursue the boy along the bank of the river.

Kevin froze. Then he started running, too. He was out of condition, he had been smoking too much, but he sprinted as hard and as fast as he could. The creature had almost caught up with the boy, and one dark arm was lifted, with claws that gleamed in the coppery gloom like razors.

“
Kevin!
” Kevin shouted out. “
Kevin!
”

The creature rumbled and billowed and immediately turned around. Kevin ran headlong into it. It was black and it was cold and its breath hit him like opening up a freezer.

Kevin saw eyes that were malevolent and narrow and yellow as pus. Eyes which had stared at him before, in nightmares. He heard a soft roar of triumph; a scissoring of teeth.

“Oh God,” he said. “It's true.”

The claws sliced through waistcoat, shirt, Aertex vest, skin, fat, muscle. They were so sharp that Kevin didn't even feel them. He was hooked up in the air, sickeningly spun around. He dropped heavily on to the river bank, on to the grass. Rolled, blindly, helpless, into the river.

The water was intensely cold. He was glad of that, because it anesthetized the pain, although he didn't like the feeling of it pouring into his sliced-open abdomen.

He was lying on his back. He knew that he was dying. He floated gradually downstream, hearing the river gurgle in his ears.

He passed under the footbridge. A horizontal bar of darkness in front of his eyes. Then he saw a small face staring down at him, wide-eyed, horrified.

Don't be frightened
, he thought to himself, as the current carried him away.
You will do the same one day. You will save Kevin yet again. And yet again. And yet again
.

He closed his eyes. He slid over the weir as lifeless as a
sack. Then he floated around the bend of the river where his mother was waiting for him.

He was sure that he could hear her whisper,
Hurry, Kevin. Hurry!

Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Amsterdam is always best out of season, when the wind cuts along the
grachten
(canals) like a craft knife. The chill always give me a good excuse to stop at a cafe for steaming mussels and fried fish, or an Indonesian restaurant for
rijstafel
. In March, the light in Amsterdam is strange and gray, so that you have a sense of being in a black-and-white movie about the life of Rembrandt. They still have hippies in Amsterdam, and trams. They also have the Nieuwe Kerk with its stunning stained-glass windows; and the Rijksmuseum, which is crammed with Flemish and Dutch masters. Less than an hour south of Amsterdam is the seaside resort of Scheveningen, with flat sandy beaches and a pier, and a curiously 1950s atmosphere, even today. During World War Two, captured German spies who were pretending to be Dutchmen were always asked by their British inquisitors to pronounce “Scheveningen” as a test of their Dutchness. Almost all of them failed.

The elevator door opened and there she was, looking directly into his eyes as if she had known that he was standing on the other side. Tall, beautiful, dressed utterly in white. He hesitated for a moment and then stepped back one half-shuffle to allow her to pass.

“
Pardon mivrouw
,” he acknowledged. She smiled briefly but didn't reply. She passed him in a pungent swirl of Calvin Klein's Obsession, and he turned around and watched her walk across the marble lobby and out through the revolving door. Her long brunette hair was lifted for a moment by the April wind out on the hotel steps. Then the doorman came forward to salute her and she was gone.

“You're going up?” asked an irritated American who was waiting for him in the elevator, his finger pressed on the Doors Open button.

“I'm sorry? Oh, no. I've changed my mind.”

He heard the man growl, “For Chrissakes, some people …” and then he found himself hurrying across the lobby and out through the door, just in time to see her climbing into the back of a taxi.

The doorman approached him and touched his cap. “Taxi, sir?”

“No, no thank you.” He stood holding his briefcase, the skirts of his raincoat flapping, watching the woman's taxi turn into Sarphatistraat, feeling abandoned and grainy and weird, like a character in a black-and-white art movie. The doorman stood beside him, smiling uneasily.

“Do you happen to know that lady's name?” he asked. His voice sounded blurry in the wind. The doorman shook his head.

“Is she a guest here?”

“I'm sorry, sir. It is not permissible for me to say.”

Gil reached into his inside pocket and for one moment considered bribery; but there was something in the doorman's smile that warned him against it. He said, “Oh, okay, sure,” and retreated awkwardly back through the revolving door. The two elderly hall porters beamed and nodded at him as he returned to the elevator. Stan and Ollie, one thin and one fat. They were obviously quite accustomed to irrational behaviour.

Gil stood in the oak-paneled elevator as it took him up to the third floor and scrutinized himself in the brass-framed mirror with as much intensity as if he were a business partner whom he suspected of cracking up. He had never done anything in years as spontaneous as chasing after that woman. What the hell had come over him? He was married, with two children, he was right on top of his job. He had a six-bedroom house in Working, a new Granada Scorpio, and he had been profiled in
Business Week
as one of the new breed of “totally committed” young entrepreneurs.

And yet he had hurried after that unknown woman as gauche and panicky as an adolescent autograph-hunter.

He closed the door of his suite behind him and stood for a long time in the middle of the room with his briefcase still in his hand, thinking. Then he set the briefcase down and slowly took off his coat. “
Pity about Gil, he's thrown a wobbly.
” He could almost hear them talking about him in the office. “
He was absolutely fine until that Amsterdam business. Probably suffering from overwork.
”

He went to the window and opened it. The hotel room overlooked the Amstel River, wide and gray, where it was crossed by the wide elevating bridge called the
Hogesluis. Trams rumbled noisily over the sluis, their bells ringing, on their way to the suburbs. The wind blew so coldly through the window that the net curtains were lifted, shuddering, and Gil found that there were tears in his eyes.

He checked his pulse. It was slightly too fast, but nothing to take to the doctor. He didn't feel feverish, either. He had been working for four days, Tuesday to Friday, sixteen to eighteen hours a day, but he had been careful not to drink too much and to rest whenever he could. Of course, it was impossible to judge what effect this round of negotiations might have had on his brain. But he
felt
normal.

But he thought of her face and he thought of her hair and he thought of the way in which she had smiled at him; a smile that had dissolved as quickly as soluble aspirin; and then was gone. And against all the psychological and anthropological logic in the world, he knew that he had fallen in love with her. Well, maybe not in
love
, maybe not actually in
love
, not the way he loved Margaret. But she had looked into his eyes and smiled at him and wafted past in beguiling currents of Obsession, and in ten seconds he had experienced more excitement, more curiosity, more plain straightforward
desire
than he had in the last ten years of marriage.

It's ridiculous, he said to himself. It's just a moment of weakness. I'm tired, I'm suffering from stress. I'm lonely, too. Nobody ever understands how lonely it can be, traveling abroad on business. No wonder so many businessmen stay in their hotel rooms, drinking too much whiskey and watching television programmes they can't understand. There is no experience so friendless as walking the streets of a strange city, with nobody to talk to.

He closed the window and went to the mini-bar
to find himself a beer. He switched on the television and watched the news in Dutch. Tomorrow morning, after he had collected the signed papers from the Gemeentevervoerbedrijf, he would take a taxi straight to Schiphol and fly back to London. Against ferocious competition from Volvo and M.A.N. Diesel, he had won an order for twenty-eight new buses for Amsterdam's municipal transport system, all to be built in Oxford.

On the phone, Brian Taylor had called him “a bloody marvel.” Margaret had squealed in delight, like she always did.

But the way the wind had lifted up that woman's hair kept running and re-running in his mind like a tiny scrap of film that had been looped to play over and over. The revolving door had turned, her hair had lifted. Shining and dark, the kind of hair that should be spread out over silk pillows.

It began to grow dark and the lights began to dip and sparkle in the river and the trams began to grind their way out to Oosterpark and the farther suburbs. Gil consulted the room-service menu to see what he could have for supper, but after he had called up to order the smoked eel and the veal schnitzel, with a half-bottle of white wine, he was taken with a sudden surge of panic about eating alone, and he called back and canceled his order.

“You don't
want
the dinner, sir?” The voice was flat, Dutch-accented, polite but curiously hostile.

“No thank you. I've … changed my mind.”

He went to the bathroom and washed his face and hands. Then he straightened his necktie, shrugged on his coat, picked up his key, and went down to the hotel's riverside bar for a drink. The bar was crowded with Japanese and American businessmen. Only two women, and both of them were quite obviously senior executives, one lopsidedly beautiful, the other as hard-faced as a man. He sat up on a bar-stool and ordered a whiskey-and-soda.

“Cold wind today, hmh?” the barman asked him.

He drank his whiskey too quickly, and he was about to order another one when the woman came and sat just one stool away from him, still dressed in white, still fragrant with Obsession. She smiled to the barman and asked for a Bacardi, in English.

Gil felt as if he were unable to breathe. He had never experienced anything like it. It was a kind of panic, like claustrophobia, and yet it had an extraordinary quality of erotic compulsion, too. He could understand why people half-strangled themselves to intensify their sexual arousal. He stared at himself glassy-eyed in the mirror behind the Genever gin-bottles, trying to detect any signs of emotional breakdown. But did it show, when you finally cracked? Did your face fall apart like a broken jug? Or was it all kept tightly inside of you? Did it snap in the back of your brain where nobody could see?